Heading down the same trail

What's in a word? It depends on time and attitude, or perhaps attitude over time.

If you jump on your road bike for a brisk ride, you may hit speeds of 25 miles per hour, keeping yourself mindful of the automobile traffic with which you share the road, and steering around bumps and potholes to keep the ride as smooth as possible.

But take to the woods on your mountain bike and the ride is completely different. You'll be lucky to hit 10 miles an hour, and the potential dangers, rather than motorized vehicles, are trees and rocks. You certainly are not expecting an asphalt-smooth path.

In fact road cycling and mountain biking are so different, it's a little surprising they're both called biking. But then, so is cruising on a Harley, though the only similarity is that you straddle the vehicle.

Which brings us to the endlessly dichotomous terms "skiing" and "snowboarding."

You may notice that this column is still called "On Skiing" though it often deals with matters and people in the world of snowboarding. It's a little awkward to opt for something like "On Skiing and Snowboarding," just a little clunky sounding.

I once tried to change it to "On Snow" but that was rejected because the names of sports columns -- "On Football," "On Hockey" -- refer to the sport, not the medium in which they're performed.

If that were the case, for the first half of this season, any football column emanating from Gillette Stadium would have been named "On Dirt."

This section used to be called "The Ski Section" when it began nearly two decades ago. But it was not until six winters ago we changed to "Snowsports" because snowboarding -- if not yet equal in the numbers -- had become a major pursuit, exploding on the winter scene much as skiing had in the 1950s.

Magazines such as Ski and Skiing, though they cover boarding as thoroughly as any, were locked into their brand name, and Ski Racing, the bible of snowsports competition, simply adopted the sub title, The Journal of Snowsport Competition. Ski Racing has a clean, determined feel to it that the publisher probably did not want to lose.

Well, about half a century after Alpine skiing was taking hold as a mainstream winter sport, and just over a decade since snowboarding made its debut as an Olympic event, it's time for some overarching term.

In the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver, the revolution will be complete when the sport of skiercross makes its debut. Follow the evolution. First there was Alpine ski racing through gates (ignoring the real start of skiing in Nordic and jumping). This ski racing became rather static, split between an emphasis on all-out speed and linking a series of technical turns. Rarely were skiers airborne, and, in fact, recreational skiers were routinely busted by ski patrollers for jumping in public terrain.

When snowboarding was making its growth move through the '80s, one strain of development came from skateboarding, a sport dedicated to performing tricks while leaping in the air. So the focus of the first boarding competition came down to the halfpipe, with one of the top point criteria being "amplitude" -- the height of the jump. In boarding, jumping (and of course doing airborne tricks and landing artfully) is the heart of the sport.

A hybrid sport really developed when snowboarding devised a terrain race in which several riders race together down a course over jumps and through turns, employing and avoiding physical contact with other racers as a means to the finish. Though it was racing down a snowy course, this spectacle was as different from traditional ski racing as could be.

And in the Vancouver Games, when skiercross makes its debut, the sport will have come almost full circle. The further development of free riding on skis will come as skiers compete in a pipe, performing the same tricks and placing the same value on amplitude that boarders do. That, too, will come to the Olympics at some point.

When one person performs in a pipe on a snowboard, followed by someone doing the same thing wearing skis, are they engaged in different sports? Two-edging and four-edging, I guess.

Remember how differently the two groups dressed? Skiers had their traditional buckled and belted trim look, and boarders with their slouching bagginess? Well, next time you look around at the crowd in the lift line, guess what? If you don't look at the equipment people are riding, you really can't tell the boarders from skiers anymore. Ski styles have borrowed heavily from boarding, with boarding styles becoming a bit trimmer.

So what do we call this amalgam of downhill gravity sports, which are more similar than Alpine and Nordic skiing ever were?

The newest magazine on the block is called Snow East, which, like Powder and Chill magazines, circumvent the issue by describing the medium, not the sport. And our own SnowSports is all inclusive so as even to include dogsledding, snowmobiling, tobogganing, and tubing.

But On Skiing will remain, without the least hope that boarding will ever allow itself to be grouped in the term skiing, but only as an acknowledgement that as time moves on the two increasingly become a distinction without much difference.